As an integral component of Arts One, students have the opportunity to author and publish a written essay.
Student Journal: ONE is a student-focused academic journal that is an exemplary showcase of Arts One writing and how students have progressed over the year. Having an essay selected to be published in the journal is an honour. Though the essays are provided here for public reading, they are all still copyrighted to their respective authors and may not be reused, revised, or reposted without express permission of those authors. Paraphrasing or quoting from them with proper citation is encouraged.
This page contains student essays from 2016 onward. To search for a specific essay, please use the search bar below. To search for a specific year, click on the dropdown menu below the search bar.
2024
Sovereigns and Slave Morality: The Nietzschean and Hobbesian Perspective on January 6th, 2021
Using the philosophy of rebellion that both Nietzsche and Hobbes provide, it becomes obvious that the January 6th insurrection was the direct product of President Trump's repetitive and skillful manipulation of the American public.
2024
Colonial Legacies and the Reclamation of One’s Identity: Revisiting Fanon in Contemporary Contexts
[...] we are invited to examine and consider how, contrary to Fanon’s perspective, scholars have come to uncover and recognize the powerful influence of historical narratives in constructing efforts to challenge and dismantle colonial structures.
2024
Trigger Warning: History Repeats Itself
In conclusion, the portrayals of creation and reproduction in the Upaniṣads objectify and demean women by implying that women exist as an extension of men to fulfill their desires and failing to give them any credit for the act of reproduction.
2024
The Illusion of Liberty: An Analysis of Sovereignty and Collective Freedom in Hobbes’s Leviathan
While Hobbes’s conception of a sovereign appears contradictory to liberty, this paper posits that his notion of the sovereign aligns with his desire to secure liberty.
2024
What Makes a Feminist?: Resisting Gender Roles in Antigone and Mary, a Fiction
The titular characters both reject these narrow roles, instead taking on more traditionally masculine abilities and roles to resist the men that have power over them.
2024
Escape the Echo: From Conformity to Autonomy
The journey from conformity to autonomy exemplifies how Mary and Absal become aware of and challenge regimes of truth in their societies, demonstrating its limitations on the self-authority of both subjugators and the subjugated.
2024
Housewives vs Magistrates: Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality
The determining factor to this private vs public influence is gender, showing a distinctly patriarchal mindset on Rousseau’s part. I conclude that Rousseau, while not considering women tyrannical, does not present himself as a feminist.
2024
Social Confinement: Captivity and Society in Herman Melville’s Typee
Tommo’s reflections on the two situations interrogate the nature of freedom both in a physical and mental sense, as well as its connection with one’s environment and circumstances.
2024
Navigating the Discontents of Civilisation: the conditions of the modern world through the lens of psychoanalysis and modernist literature
[...] it is substantial to recognise the bridge between psychoanalysis and twentieth-century literature; and how beneath the flux of modernity runs the dashing stream of human consciousness, flashing light and dark with the mind’s psychology.
2024
Divine Funerals: The Temporal Self in Freud and Rousseau
The addition of chronological narration to existence is what the human subject comes to understand as temporality: the temporal, or, time, is absent without being, for without being there is nothing to categorize existence with using time.
2024
Reaping as we Sow: Gandhi’s View of Modernity in Hind Swaraj
My analysis seeks to prove that Gandhi’s critique of modernity should be understood on both literal and figurative levels.
2024
To Love or Not to Love Thy Neighbour: Civilization As a Window to the Good
Despite the complexities in their dialogue, the three thinkers nonetheless all stumble into agreement on one point, perhaps our strongest case yet for a universal truth: how we ought to live is inextricably tied to who we ought to be.
2024
The Self, Society, and Liberation in Black Skin, White Masks and the Philosophy of Mohammad Iqbal
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks provides a robust account of the historical processes and forces instrumental in the experiences of objectification and loss of selfhood of Black/colonized peoples.
2024
There’s No Place Like Home: The Role of Cities in Shaping the Self in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
[...] this essay will discuss how these cities shape Changez’s identity, not just as mere backdrops but as active participants in the story of a man searching for identity, caught between diverging cultures and shifting allegiances.
2024
Shedding Fundamentalism— The American Identity
Through the story of Changez, Hamid challenges one to rethink what the American dream and identity can offer to a foreigner, and whether that is something one should be chasing after at all.
2024
Let Me Tell You A Story: Nonlinear Narratives and Generational Influence in A Bird in the House and As I Remember It
Both Margaret Laurence’s collection of short stories, A Bird in the House, and Elsie Paul’s multimedia digital work, As I Remember It, are uniquely structured works that challenge conventional linear storytelling.
2024
Heir to the Brick House
Within Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, Vanessa’s independent sense of self is shown to be inherited from her controlling grandfather, which ironically explains the resentment she holds towards him.
2023
Thebes and its Discontents: Psychology and Politics in Sophocles and Freud
A civil war ends when an authoritarian leader takes over the city. A woman tries to bury the body of her brother, but is forbidden by the leader. She speaks out against him, and becomes a rebel against the regime in the process.
2023
So, What Now? Understanding Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. (And Stay Tuned for the Deepest Secrets of Life.)
It was in the late 19th century that Friedrich Nietzsche launched his famous attack against religion and its moral precepts. Since the time of Nietzsche’s writing, Western society has only become more secular.
2023
Comparing The Philosophies of Mohandas Gandhi and Friedrich Nietzsche As Outlined In On The Genealogy of Morality and Hind Swaraj
Mohandas Gandhi’s treatise Hind Swaraj lays out the philosophical groundwork that outlines how India should depart the British Raj and become a self-governed nation.
2023
Rousseau, Reason, and the Films of Human Shame
To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reason is a burden. To him, it planted in humanity a coven of abstract fears and vices and was responsible for leading humankind to “purchase imaginary repose at the price of real happiness.”
2023
Sacrifice, Suffering, and Politics: Exploring Dharma and its Centrality to the Attainment of Swaraj
As Hind Swaraj pieces together a passionate argument, I briefly solicit attention towards the hidden paradoxes, subtilties, and the interplay between philosophy and politics that dharma entails.
2023
Hamlet: Revenge Over Remembrance
Few facts are certain in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whether in terms of its characters' allegiances, the motivations behind their actions, and in a few cases, even the sanity of some characters.
2023
The Inevitable Fact of Captivity in Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
Given the dramatic conclusion, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life invites the readers to reflect upon the force of one’s innate desire to be free, as well as the Eurocentric colonial narratives that engrain a lingering and potent prejudice.
2023
Objectification Versus Subjectification: The Self-Perpetuating Cycles Between the Psyche and Society
It is through the intricately-detailed prose of Frantz Fanon’s writing that scenes of objectification are depicted in Black Skin, White Masks.
2023
Our Lives are Built on Weaving All Our Stories into Worlds We Call Our Own: The Stories that Create Personal Identity in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House
A Bird in the House is a collection of stories narrated by a character named Vanessa. While Vanessa the narrator is an adult, the collection is about a younger Vanessa, who is a writer in her own right.
2023
A Charkha Between Kallipolis and Worker’s Utopia: Unraveling Gandhian Self-Rule and Self-Control through Marxist and Platonic Philosophy
[...] Gandhi’s notion of personal self-control may be understood as a spiritual entity transcending both Karl Marx and Plato as well as the text’s conception of modernity.
2023
Nature as Nurture: The Role of the Physical in the Journey to Enlightenment
Thinkers from all ages argue that we, as beings, are restricted by the physical world. Whether it be a heaven or some greater truth, there exists a metaphysical world which is unreachable through physical means.
2023
American Eulogy: Dissecting the Proverbial Death of New York in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Beyond
In examining both Hamid’s novel and the world that it is reflecting, it becomes clear that for Changez and many people like him, the “America” of New York, that global city, died in 2001.
2023
Societal Alienation and Discontent: Freud and Marx on Our Relationship with Love, Libido, and Labour
Thus, the pain of Freud’s reality principle is minimized, if not outright eliminated, and the development of the ego begins to look much more like that of Marx and Engels’ universal individual.
2023
“The compassionate heart finds not any comfort, but dreads an eternal separation"
She uses compassion to help ground her sense of self, but is ultimately left at the end of the text with “a void” (148) in her heart as she comes to the realisation that the comfort of compassion is ephemeral and fleeting.
2023
Never Enough: Frantz Fanon and Identity
Whiteness as a social structure is perhaps the most pervasive descriptor of difference, being, and non-being. Structures of whiteness and being formally delimit the identities, bodies, and lives of non-white people.
2022
There’s A Place For Us: Aromanticism and Amatonormativity in Jane Austen’s Emma
Reading Emma as aromantic thus codes her arc as that of a queer person who, through overcoming conflict and self-discovery, finds a place where she is loved without being forced to change her nature.
2022
But We Sing it Anyway: Understanding female agency on a textual and metatextual level through Sappho’s fragments, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown
By examining Sappho’s fragments, Jane Austen’s Emma, and Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, it becomes possible to understand more deeply women’s loss of agency and control, as well as their attempts at securing it.
2022
Culture and Consumption: The Importance of Food within Typee and Unfamiliar Fishes
Food can be viewed as a necessity to keep humans alive, but it can also be viewed as an integral form of cultural expression, an indicator of economic values, and as a gateway to cultural destruction.
2022
Stop Acting Like a Know-It-All
[...] society makes man ignorant through the means of power structures that declare moral values that dictate how one understands their moral self, ultimately proving that man does not know and will never know themselves completely.
2022
Finding Liberation Amidst Laughter: The Misread Matrona in Plautus’ Amphitruo
As bright lights illuminate the stage of the Jericho Arts Center, an elderly woman wearing a pink dress and a pregnant belly emerges from the darkness. No laughter sounds from the audience.
2022
Lower The Masks And Unlock The Cage Door
This paper will demonstrate how Laurence's vast and encrypted themes within A Bird In The House dwindle down to a central idea, the symbolism that illuminates the confinement of gender based roles within Manawaka.
2022
The Queering of the Self in Herman Melville’s Typee
In exploring homoeroticism and cultural deviance, the writings of Typee operate on the intersection of queer and colonial history [...]
2022
“Under the Veil,” into “Double-Consciousness”: W. E. B. Du Bois in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Kendrick Lamar’s “u” and “i”
This essay focuses on how Rankine and Lamar play with the first and second-person perspectives, implicating their audiences in their works and revealing the associations implicit in their use.
2022
Angels: Feminine Salvation and Gendered Damnation in Crime and Punishment
There is no denying the significance of the women who occupy the world of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It is a work distinguished by its complex, colourful, and memorable female characters.
2022
The Darkness of Mere Being: Masking Queerness in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen
Amidst conventional representations of gender and sexuality, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen introduces a team of masked crimefighters who complicate the definition of heroism and redefine heroic sexuality.
2022
Alive in Art: Art as it Relates to Life in Still Life with a Bridle
Through discussing the interpretation of life through art, and the importance of art to life, the preservative properties of art will be argued, as art can be considered a means of both prolonging and universalizing individual experience.
2022
What the Blind Mind's Eye Sees: The Effect of Ekphrases in Still Life With a Bridle
By guiding the reader through the process of engaging with these paintings, Herbert ensures that the elements that he relies on for his argument are noticed and understood.
2022
Desire, Wisdom, and the Importance of Poets: William Blake’s Response to Plato’s Republic
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake makes clear through references to the Allegory of the Cave that he has read Plato’s classic text Republic, and throughout the text, Blake engages with the ideas and issues that are presented in Republic.
2022
Arms Like Tongs: The Power and Plight of Women in Grettir's Saga
Set in Iceland’s Viking era, Grettir’s Saga follows the life of Grettir Asmundarson—a famously strong, cunning, and cursed man—as he fights enemies and rids Iceland of the undead, completing many cruel and heroic deeds along his journey.
2021
Verdure and Vermin: The Similarity and Superiority of Emma Woodhouse and Raskolnikov
At first glance, Jane Austen’s Emma and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment seem as different from one another as two novels can be.
2021
Material Conditions: A Comparative Analysis of Idealism and Materialism
Through a comparative analysis of both philosophies, individuals and society as a collective can better understand the significant role that material conditions play, whether instrumental in our development or essential to it.
2021
“The Dissolving Blues of Metaphor”: Rankine’s Reconstruction of Racism as Metaphor in Citizen: An American Lyric
By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen.
2021
Tommo’s Imprisonment to His Own Cultural Values: Recognizing Cultural Bias in Typee
It is important to consider how Tommo’s reliance on his own cultural norms prevents him from ever fully accepting the Typeean practices that are foreign to him because it shows how confined he is to his own conventions.
2021
Cannibal Continuity: Social Cannibalism in Melville and Coates
Herman Melville’s Typee depicts cannibalism at a time when the practice’s nature, and even its existence, is an uncertain question for its contemporary readers.
2021
Rankine and The Pronoun Dreamworld: The Creation of Compassion
In her series of lyric essays Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine employs the pronoun “you” in both an accusatory and uniting fashion. The feelings of Black people are often neglected and scorned, and Rankine’s direct address to the rea
2021
Crime and Punishment: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
“God is dead.” So said Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882’s The Gay Science, but for some, God had been dead long before Nietzsche wrote His death into the public consciousness and put in His place stood a new breed of men, the Übermensch.
2021
Rorschach’s Hypocrisy: The Moral Ambiguity of Watchmen’s Black and White Antihero
From the saturated pages of Watchmen emerges Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ antihero protagonist Rorschach, a stark representation of black and white against the vivid colouring of Watchmen’s setting and other characters.
2021
Herman Melville’s Typee and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing-World: A Comparison
There are many similarities between Herman Melville’s 1846 novel Typee and Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel The Blazing-World. Both texts focus on an outsider who is given an intimate view of a society fundamentally different from their own.
2021
Outlawed but Not Alone: Friendships Out of Bounds in Grettir’s Saga
This essay will be interested in how Grettir’s friendships function when they are removed from their moral and societal contexts.
2021
Queering Melville
The largely negative outcomes of these romances seem to suggest Melville’s internal grappling with the idea that an openly queer lifestyle was not achievable or accepted in the time in which he lived and wrote.
2021
Gender? I Hardly Know Her Exploring the Hyperreality of Gender and Sexual Identities
[...] this essay examines how gender and sexuality, as imitations without originals, reapproximations of an invented ideal, generate their own hyperreality, a simulation endlessly reinforced by the belief that it hasn’t already encompassed us all.
2021
Painting with Words - The Illusive Art of Representation Appearance and Reality From the Perspective of Visual and Literary Art in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle
The relationship between visual and literary forms of art and how they inform appearance and reality in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle demonstrate the ways in which representations can be both illusive and illuminating.
2021
Loving Her Was Red: The Dichotomy of Love and Desire According To Sappho and Taylor Swift
Both women display remarkable agency as they examine the undervalued world of female love and desire; both women, as Swift says in “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)”, invite us to dive into this world with them “head first, fearless”.
2021
Destined Distance Between Melville, Tommo, and the Typee
The Valley is Eden, the people are gods and goddesses, the structures are antiquities, and Tommo—as well as Melville—can only ever be a corrupt civilized man.
2021
Atmospheric Prisons and Incomplete Epiphanies in The Matrix and Jane Austen’s Emma
Emma’s moments of self-realization parallel those of Neo through the symbolic use of these atmospheric techniques, which serves to emphasize first the reluctance and doubt, then later the freeing acceptance of truth for both characters.
2021
Heroes and Heroism in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen
Ultimately, no heroes exist in Watchmen. The superheroes have abandoned compassion, instead choosing campaigns that leave them bereft in the act of saving actual human beings and almost fully empty of real heroism.
2021
Austen’s Emma: Self-Knowledge and Growth
Satirically critiquing her characters’ behaviours and the English society in which they—and she—live, Jane Austen sketches a vivid portrait of her characters, their flaws, and the confines under which they operate in Emma.
2021
The Danger of the Unclassifiable Form: Hybridity, Rulership, and Knowledge within Cavendish’s Blazing World
The Empress overlooks gaps within her own understanding in favour of creating an empirical understanding of the world around her; she rejects the hybridity of the animal men, and she rejects knowledge of the immaterial world.
2021
The Restrictive Power of Schools and Streets in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me exposes both groups as manifestations of how America methodically oppresses black people, specifically by accentuating the power and prestige of those who believe they are white.
2021
This World of My Devising: The Author as Authority and Other in Cavendish’s The Blazing World
This essay concentrates on the treatment of authority and authorship in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, particularly through the lens of otherness.
2021
Double Standards: Analyzing the Gender Inequality Lurking in Rousseau’s Discourse
In this essay, I will elucidate why Rousseau places so much emphasis on the presocial, how his biased discussion thwarts any subjectivity that Woman ought to possess, and why he views modern Woman as a dangerous force within society.
2020
A Class of Their Own: Empowerment through literature in Coates’ Between the World and Me, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Shelly’s Frankenstein
Education offers empowerment. To know more about the world, the people in it, and how they respond to the hardship around them is to prepare for life as an independent adult.
2020
Same Racists, Different Experiences: Comparing Race, Assimilation, and Identity through Literature
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King writes that “somebody once told me that racism hurts everyone. Perhaps in the broader sense of community, this is true. All I know is that it seems to hurt some much more than others” (King 185).
2020
Not Simply Black and White: Whiteness as a Matter of Belief in Coates’ Between the World and Me
Many Americans are blissfully ignorant, but Baldwin and Coates, as witnesses to the truth, use the power of words to expose American racism.
2020
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: How the Psychological Afflictions of Plath’s Esther Greenwood and Shakespeare’s Ophelia are products of binary worlds in The Bell Jar and Hamlet
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet were written hundreds of years apart, but certain characters in the two works seem to have their lives controlled by similar conditions.
2020
Lucretius: The Risk and Rage of the Joys and Despairs of Love
[...] instead of providing a compelling argument for such casual, detached relationships, Lucretius only highlights his own misogyny and bitterness towards women, and ignores the potential losses inherent in the life strategy he is promoting.
2020
The Karamazov Brothers and their Discontents: A Freudian Reading of Pain and Pleasure, Aggression and Confession in Dostoevsky’s Classic Novel
In these works, both authors show us what it is like to be human: how we are motivated by parts of ourselves we’d like to wish didn’t exist, and how most of us spend most of our lives struggling to figure out what the best way to live it is.
2020
I’m Talking to You: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist garnered widespread acclaim as a daring attempt by Hamid to redefine the prevailing post-9/11 narrative to include the unheard, post-colonial voice while simultaneously silencing the neo-imperial voice.
2020
The Reflection
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the characters of Victor and his creature parallel each other as they both face injustice and suffering and both resort to violent revenge.
2020
I am Not Your Stepping Stone: An Analysis of Ethnocentric Bias in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
In a world shocked by the horror of death and calamity that came from 9/11, Mohsin Hamid allows us to listen to the voice of a Pakistani-American during this tumultuous time.
2020
A Faux Confession
Changez’s inherently biased prose facilitates the effective communication of his history while simultaneously conveying more obscure issues of race and prejudice that resonate with relevance.
2020
“Thus Conscience Does Make Cowards of Us All:” Hamlet’s Freudian Sense of Guilt
Hamlet can be read as the prince’s struggle between Freud’s two imagined stages of the sense of guilt.
2020
A Return to the Sea
This essay seeks to examine the sea as a symbol of an expanded consciousness through its representation during the stages of Edna’s awakening [...]
2020
American Madmen: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Purpose of Science
When considering where to lay blame for the hypothetical end of the world, it can be hard to decide whether responsibility lies with the creators of the means of destruction or those who actively put these means to use.
2020
Eichmann, Oppenheimer, and the Perils of Blind Obedience
In deviating from a Thrasymachean conception of justice, Oppenheimer enters a Socratic domain that puts the collective good into the foreground.
2020
Nietzsche and Arendt’s Warnings Against Totalitarianism
Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt have both been misinterpreted with regard to their attitude toward the Nazis, but in fact they both hold very strong and uncompromising anti-Nazi views.
2020
What Does Justice Look Like for the “Banal” Adolf Eichmann?
How does Arendt’s theory of “banality of evil” challenge both Plato’s and our own subsequent view on evil and injustice? This central question is what makes Eichmann in Jerusalem so philosophically groundbreaking [...]
2019
Watchmen: Impediments, Failures, and Splits in Understanding
This paper will be an examination of impediments, failures, and splits in attempts to understand reality.
2019
The Past, Present, and Future in The Road
The past can be a dangerous thing. Post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, affects one’s future in innumerable ways, molding itself into fear and sadness, leaving one trapped at the bottom of the past’s well, the rope unreachable.
2019
In His Time: How Ernest Hemingway Defines and Promotes Masculinity in In Our Time.
Overall, the portrayal of themes of masculinity and femininity in In Our Times is not clear-cut. Whilst seemingly a direct attack on women, Hemingway in fact prioritizes his attack on femininity, whether embodied by man or woman [...]
2019
Liberty in Leviathan
This paper argues that although Hobbes advocates for authoritarian government, parts of his argument still tilt towards liberty.
2019
Just Ideas? An analysis of the use of political authority to bring about justice in the world
This essay will explore these uses of political authority beginning with the works of Sophocles, Plato, Hobbes, Hemingway, and Marx. The essay will argue that these deployments of authority find their beginnings in the conceptualization of justice.
2019
Enlightenment for Dummies: The Simple Guide to ‘Finding Yourself’ by Friedrich Nietzsche
I believe that On the Genealogy of Morality was written to tell us that, should we become aware of the flaws in the values on which he writes and alter our opinions accordingly, we just might happen to ‘find ourselves one day’ (GM, Preface, p.1).
2019
The Bear, the Bird, and the Irishman: An Examination of the Loss of Innocence in “The Sound of Singing”
In the last images of the text, Dan has left the house, and with him innocence has left as well. Vanessa races to catch up to the fading sound of his singing, but doubts she’ll ever reach it.
2019
The American Nightmare: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
Although they may not seem similar at first glance, the novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Bell Jar share the same goal: to make readers aware of how the American Dream can be detrimental to young people.
2019
Watchmen and The Odyssey on the Nature of Violence
[...] the characters are meant to be human, truly human, with all the limitations of a normal human being, and the way in which the reader can identify this humanity is through their exposure to violence.
2019
“A Lightning Burst of Knowingness”: What Chris Reveals About the Connor-MacLeod Family in A Bird in the House
[...] Chris sheds light on the different ways Vanessa’s family engages in arguments and conflict, and the ways they try (though they don’t always succeed) to communicate with one another.
2019
Impression and Identity: How Margaret Laurence Reveals Character Through Observation and Reflection in A Bird in the House’s “The Mask of the Bear”
By providing glimpses of pain, emotion, and rich motivations, Laurence is able to strip the “rough-pioneer” stigma many Canadians associated with their personal histories.
2019
Understanding White
I followed this idea back to its source—to the essays of James Baldwin—to finally begin to understand what it means to believe I am white, and to understand the consequences that belief can have.
2019
Alienation and Belonging in Authority and Resistance
This paper will explore the ways in which different works read in Arts One this year address the role of alienation as a tool of authority and the importance of a sense of belonging in resistance.
2019
Love is Where Edges Meet
[...] the story of love that Fadiman’s chronicles convey seems to suggest that it is through this universal human emotion that one can end moral hegemony.
2018
V as Conductor
In Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, the eponymous V declares, following the word’s etymology, that “anarchy means ‘without leaders’” (195). However, just as the text’s evaluation of fascism does not necessarily coalesce with
2018
The Perfect Match: Satire and Suffering in the Poor Mouth and the Inconvenient Indian
As James Joyce, the most influential Irish novelist, writes, Flann O’Brien is “a real writer with the true comic spirit”, a spirit that pervades The Poor Mouth. There is no doubt humour is a crucial factor of the book, a momentous aspect that s
2018
Power Glove: Biopower and Video Games in The Three-Body Problem
One of the key concepts discussed in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is that of biopower. Loosely defined, biopower is “the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population,” with these practices constituting how “organiza
2018
Cleanup on Isle Five
After many years of being asked, “If you were on an island and could only bring one thing, what would you bring?” one may be frustrated after reading The Tempest for never having said magic powers. With magic powers, one can do practically anythi
2018
We'll Take a Cup of Resistance Yet, for Absolutism is not the End
Rooted in scientific deduction and reasoning, Thomas Hobbes’s depiction of authority is a response to his understanding of human behaviours in the state of nature. Hobbes maintains that inherent human aversions and passions propel the disintegratio
2018
I will love/even unwilling: bell hooks and Sappho on love as an action
Sappho’s enshrinement in pop culture “as [a] love goddess,” according to bell hooks, has been essential in suppressing a long-held narrative of love constructed primarily by male poets (hooks, xxi). However, Sappho’s conceptions of love (at l
2018
Ruined?
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down recounts a conflict that occurred between a Hmong family and an American hospital regarding the treatment of a Hmong epileptic (in the eyes of the Western medical tradition) girl, Lia Lee.
2018
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger tells the story of the self-made man, Balram Halwai, who claims himself to be many things: a servant, a philosopher, an entrepreneur, and a murderer. Although these professions are certainly apart of Balram’s
2018
Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth, Too: Gender in bell hooks’ all about love
In a society so deeply imbued with patriarchy, women and men struggle to navigate their relationships with love and power, leaving many distraught and hopeless. bell hooks’ all about love: new visions is both a celebration of love and its cathartic
2018
The Effects and Reflection of Space in Émile Zola’s Germinal
In Émile Zola’s novel Germinal, the distinction between characters from differing social classes can be seen in their outward appearances. However, a subtler distinction can be seen through the use of space.
2018
Panasonic: The Power Of Language In White Noise
Used to establish keystones of identity, emotion, and culture, language defines many of the parameters of human life. In his novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo analyzes the power and limitation of language in a technologically advancing world.
2017
Sayers’ Method of Understanding Academia
As Harriet Vane returns to Shrewsbury College and the world of academia within Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, she becomes entrenched in a war of attrition between the college’s reputation and a figure intent on undermining it with the use of obs
2017
The Marriage of Science and Art in Carson's Silent Spring
As an environmentalist, living in the 21st Century, I have come across the idea of connectedness time and time again. I have come to understand how the universe is a whole, and made of countless components. Rachel Carson played a large role in the en
2017
The Silence of God
Death is the most prominent theme in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, manifested in the lives of Jack and Babette, primarily in the form of constant noise in the background. There is always someone humming (DeLillo 27) or the TV is left on with nobody wa
2017
The Feminist Façade
Women maintain a constant presence in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night, and they all seem to have achieved positions of power through various means. This image of an empowered woman might seemingly contribute to the novel’s feminist nature. However
2017
Of Virginity and Violence
Certain qualities of classical fairytales and myths beg for feminist adaptations. The blatant misogyny and unapologetic reinforcement of patriarchal values they display has prompted a host of contemporized re-imaginations such as those of The Bloody
2017
Marriage, Magic and Invisibility
Rulers must make clear the distinction between their subordinates and themselves if they are to demonstrate believable authority, and Prospero in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is no exception.
2017
“Hi non sunt homines”: Perspectives on Humanization on Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau as Influenced by Contemporary Philosophy and Surgical Science
Humans have, for millennia, felt a desire to impose their unique characteristics on other animals. When we look at a dog, we typically imagine that it looks at humans around it much as we look at other people. We imagine that the dog is thinking abou
2017
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: A Heaven of Misery
Life in late 18th-century London was difficult, especially for those who were unfortunate enough to be stricken with poverty during this time of industrial revolution. Arguably, the people who suffered from this hardship the most were children, which
2017
Power to the People: The role of the People in The Prince
In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli promises to "set aside fantasies about rulers, then, and consider what happens in fact."[1] The result is a book with a political philosophy that eludes classification, even today.
2017
Looking for clothes but grasping at darkness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – an exploration of negative space
Chekhov’s concept of ‘showing not telling’ continues to pervade both film and text today. Whereas contemporary films have access to dialogue as a medium of communication between director and audience, silent films instead heavily rely on visual
2017
The Intuitionist: Where Black Men Tell White Lies and Silence Turns Loud
The human experience, as subjective and relative as it may be, is rooted deeply in two worlds: that which can be seen and physically touched, and that which cannot. As Colson Whitehead tells the story of Lila Mae’s life in the dystopian elevator wo
2017
Investigating the Death of the Author in Paul Auster's City of Glass
The structural critic describes the characters of a novel as nothing more than “the noise of their name” (Gass, 1970, 49), as any fixed aspect of the narrative structure to which the reader will always return as “music returns to its theme” (
2017
The Sound of Scandal: An analysis of the thematic significance of jazz in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
While many critics of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz choose to focus on her use of the music form’s distinct structure in the narrative voice, jazz music itself also plays a vital thematic role in the story. By incorporating motifs of jazz into her H
2017
Guilty Women: An Analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” Utilizing Laura Mulvey’s Theories of Scopophilia and Female Narrative Roles
She stands alone in a crowded room. Her hair captures the light, framing her face with soft, ethereal radiance. She smiles gently at the people around her, yet remains still, untouched, as though she is waiting for something to happen.
2017
Where did Plato and Galileo search for truth? The inward and outward search for epistemological and metaphysical certainty
Creating a binary between looking inward and outward when thinking about philosophy is obfuscatory, particularly when dealing with the works of Galileo and Plato. Galileo literally gazes at the sun until he is blind, while Plato looks into his mind a
2016
From Words to Images: A Comparison of Paul Auster's City of Glass and Its Graphic Novel Adaptation
Paul Auster's novel, City of Glass, fabricates a world in which appearances often fail to correspond to reality and the readers can be as confused and bewildered as the characters in the novel. To adapt City of Glass into a graphic novel, where image
2016
Sylvia Plath: The Devil and The White Macaw
Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood has a complex understanding of her enlivened friend Doreen, which makes her long for a similarly spirited disposition. Esther’s existence is instead confined by the ever-present thoughts of death plaguing her mind.
2016
Female Forces Behind the Mask: Rorschach’s Path to Violence and Heroism
There are few things that are black-and-white in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. Instead, heroes and villains and the justification of violence blur together into one disheveled and messy humanity.
2016
Sebald's Barbaric Poetry
"Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch," wrote Theodor Adorno. "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism." Since writing it in his 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," this sentence has been quoted and appropriated time
2016
A Smidge too Manly, A Smidge too Motherly: An Analysis of Midge, the Friend-Zoned Female in Hitchcock's Vertigo
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 11). This quote from
2016
you burn me: Sappho In Conversation With Faulkner On Life After Death
The narrative of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner could not exist without the character Addie Bundren – mother of five and wife to Anse. Throughout the chapters of the novel, the narrative’s perspective changes from character to character as th
2016
Convergence of Meaning: The Tripartite Nature of ‘I’ in Paul Auster’s City of Glass
Paul Auster’s City of Glass is a text that confronts a wide array of themes, two of the most prominent being language and identity. Language is presented as the conveyor of meaning, connected to the Biblical myth of Babel, whereas meaning is an eva
2016
Falling in Love with Siri: Undermining the Male Gaze through the Removal of the Female Body in Her
In her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey aims to bring the oppressive male gaze into question, noting that, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/f
2016
Midge’s Point of View: Unacknowledged Subversion of the Symbolic in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” includes a discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. While the discussion is relatively short, spanning less than a page, it makes important claims about the value of
2016
Sigmund Tzu and the Dream World
Delving deep into the psyche of Dora, Freud’s case history, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), navigates the thoughts and dreams that course through her psyche to find, pick apart, and analyze the potential causes of grief and s
2016
Eyes to Watch
Eyes are everywhere in the comic series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. From the eyes of every character to the pupil-like circles of clocks and “fallout shelter” signs, figures of vision can be found throughout.
2016
The Souls of Black Folk and The Essentiality of Human Connection
Du Bois’ classic text The Souls of Black Folk does not at first read as a cohesive argument. Rather, each chapter offers a different style, a different purpose, and this makes for a complex and at times disjointed reading experience. The unifying f
2016
Anne Frank: The Young Girl and the Writer
When Hitler began his long rise to power in 1919 and promoted anti-Semitism across Europe, the world was devastated by the horror that ensued. Amongst the approximately 60 million people killed during the war, 11 million of them were Jews. Anne Frank
2016
Where the Road Ends
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road explores the bleak and barren post-apocalyptic world of a father and his son and their journey to find sanctuary. As the father and son travel throughout the novel they travel farther and farther down the road. In this ne
2016
The Person in the Picture: The Image and the Self of Esther Greenwood
Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is photographed many times. Sometimes the act of being photographed is equated with the objectification of Esther, which is to say, the photographer takes away Esther’s personhood and she becomes an object
2016
Backstreets: Shadows, Violence and Queerness in Watchmen
The visual language of queerness in 2010s America is defined by brightness—rainbows, glitter—declaring a queer existence fully saturated with light. But the torture and death of the only gay characters in popular TV shows, the sensationalization
2016
Opposing Oppenheimers
Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer recounts the trial of one of the most prominent physicists in history. Oppenheimer, often called the father of the atomic bomb, was summoned before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and i
2016
We Didn't Start the Fire
“Are you one of the good guys?” (McCarthy 282). The father-son odyssey of The Road is consumed by constant searching for food, shelter, or safety. The father is searching for something else, as well, something intangible but just as necessary for
2016
Mulvey vs. Carter: The Power of the Gaze
Both Laura Mulvey and Angela Carter are well-noted female writers in the 1970’s that have talked about feminism through their writings. In Mulvey’s famous article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she talks about how most popular cinema
2016
The Communist Manifesto and its earlier drafts: Further explanation, or simply an ignorance of the truth?
Inspiring a movement is not only a difficult, but a lengthy process. The perfect combination of motivation in the population, necessity for change, as well as belief that a particular movement will improve the peoples’ lives will create the necessa
2016
Voices Rolling in the Deep
In writing Austerlitz, Sebald endeavours to tell a story that, in its scope and controversy, is harrowing to tell. Faced with the barbarism of the Holocaust and the impossible challenge of bringing its victims’ histories back from the dead, he mani
2016
“He’s Coming To Steal My Eyes”: Vision, Survival, Connection, and Existence in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Sight is a profoundly important sense. Vision helps one navigate through the world, but it is also intensely emotional. It matters what we choose to look at, as well as what we allow to look at us, and it is terrifying when vision is obscured, for th
2016
From Bodies Politic to the Body Politic: A Modus Operandi for a Modus Vivendi
The Hobbesian state of nature both begins and ends with human nature. While Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is widely regarded as advocating a pessimistic view of human nature, Hobbes’ pessimism is not directed towards human nature, but towards the stat
2016
Technicolour Ideals: The Poison-Saturated Society of Plath's The Bell Jar
Colour permeates Esther Greenwood’s narration in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Esther often articulates her visual perception in vivid colour. She particularly emphasizes the aesthetic of a film she watches with the Ladies’ Day girls. The film i
2016
Forget the Juice Cleanse: Rid Yourself of Male Toxicity for a Fresh, Rejuvenated Glow! (Only $99.99 for a limited time)
The ability to embrace femininity has always been a uphill battle in relation to the issues women have dealt with in Western society: in recent years, liberating ourselves through our sexuality has become apparent through movements like “SlutWalk
2016
The Decolonization Manifesto: Marx and Muslims
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon enhances a Marxist analysis by addressing the intersections of race, colonialism and capitalism. Fanon uses the terminology of Marx and Engels but applies it in different ways. By ‘stretching’ Marxist an
2016
Asserting Meaning in Dabydeen's "Brown Skin Girl"
David Dabydeen’s Slave Song addresses the dilemma of how to identify the ‘true’ voice of a Guayanese culture that has been clouded and corrupted historically by the voice of colonialism. Dabydeen, born in Guyana to Indian parents but having emi
2016
Dreams We Must Loathe
As the Man attempts to walk the narrow line separating blind optimism and consuming despair, he uses his dreams and memories to keep him situated on the difficult path of realistic survival. The combination of the will to survive and unavoidable desp